"Impulskontroll nada" Maskulina iscens ttningar och sociala kategoriseringar

This article investigates the local social process through which boys are portrayed as having emotional, social and behavioral problems and, as part of this, categorized in terms of neuropsychiatric diagnoses. The invocation of biomedical categorizations, are here treated from an ethnomedodological and anti-mentalist view as people’s resources for conducting institutional business. Data draws on ethnographic work in a special educational needs unit attended by mainly boys diagnosed with ADHD. It was found that the boys’ through their resistance towards teachers’ authority forced the teachers to account for their actions. The boys’ resistance was mainly read as symptoms of inner emotional and mental states, warranting a solidification of their category incumbency as ‘boys with ADHD’. Overall, our study demonstrates that the school is an important player in indexing boys’ troubling classroom conduct in terms of biomedical explanatory resources.